Articles

THE SINKING OF HELEN

August, 1852

Russell Wallace does not weep as the brig burns. The badly packed balsam had erupted like booze. His crew is safe, but his catch remains. The grief is held in check, and waits for rescue, while monkeys shriek and birds riot on deck.

He will not let one curse exhale, but leans as if relaxing, and looking for the stars as he once searched for the dozens of creatures that leapt from trees in the amazon, whose homes were wet and breath held clean air.

“Am I their torturer?” he thinks. Wallace the merciless, who took the New World birds from their horizon, then squeezed them into a cage, only to let them loose into this inferno which has only one mast left? Three years toil, and exile, plunging

deeper into the source of the river, detailing each form and home. From all of this, one specimen survives. A parrot splashes into the Atlantic. It flies clumsy as a drunk around his life-boat.

There will be time for grief, a time to rest before he’d catch a new idea in Java. For now this failure won’t pull him down. For now he’ll search for stars, like a weight-lifter exercising a muscle he worries could atrophy.

THE STONES

i

How do I use this moment? How do I please the jealous older man looking at me testing boots against the surface of snow? But I will not meet him, thankfully, on any train rudely asking for my seat; he’ll show no interest in how I went about to spend my younger days. He'll be indifferent as one hobbyist to another as a tennis player to a musician. There will be enough obsessions to fill his hands, until he’s yearning to get it over soon. He'll forget the present should be given credence over a long sleep, prurient down to its essence.

ii

Or perhaps, he’ll feel different. He'll think as many as there are stones there are fourteen souls and for every soul there are eighteen mealy-bugs and as many as their children there are little toads and for every moist tadpole there lives an obsessive thought; and the only way to kill that thought will be to crush a brown egg found inside a duck, caught inside a hare, logged within an iron chest buried at the foot of a green oak tree pitched by the sea onto an island.

SEAN CAMPBELL has seen his work appear in Boston Review, The Critical Flame, The Battersea Review, Poetry Northeast, and Clarion. He holds an MFA from Emerson College and lives and works in Boston.